5 Stats Tracking Plugins For Your WordPress Blog

Ladies and Gentleman, today you life and your blogging habits, as you know them will change forever! And not necessary to the best as I’m about to show you how to get MORE information about your blog, how your visitors interact with your content and where they are coming from than most bloggers need to know!

In Fact – Stats Tracking is One Of The Most Addictive And Time Wasting Activities You, As A Blogger Can Participate In!

I highly recommend you stop reading RIGHT NOW and don’t click that “Read More..” link to save your sanity and time!

OK, so I see you are determined to know! Well, this could be a GREAT thing as well as BAD thing for you. You have to exercise the discipline and limit time you dedicate to stat tracking to avoid waste of time and if you manage to do so – you are going to be a MUCH MORE INFORMED blogger.

5 Stats Tracking Plugins

…presented in this post will allow you to see more details about your blog traffic, its source and how your visitors interact with your content than you ever thought possible!

Along with Google Analytic’s this plugin might be that is needed for the majority of bloggers as it allows you to re-use same WordPress.com API you are already using for Akismet and presents you with most of the useful statistics you need:

Top Pages and posts for different time frames with default being today

Your referrers, to help you see who sends you traffic

What key phrases lead from Search Engines to your blog posts

What links were clicked in your blog content

List of incoming links, mentions of your blog url on other blogs

Because it is a plugin maintained by WordPress core team, it is always timely updated and you can be sure it will continue to be compatible with all the latest upgrades.

Instead of picking and choosing any specific plugin, I simply give you URL to search results in WordPress.org plugin repository. You choose which one gives you the options you need as this breed of plugins integrates Google Analytics into your blog.

I do believe that you MUST have Google Analytics on your blog for stats tracking and comprehensive reporting but I choose NOT to use plugins but simply manually insert code into fotter.php right before the </body> closing tag. Just inspect the source code of this blog and you see what I mean.

I like to use as few plugins as possible and by doing this manually I save on page load by not having an extra plugin for the task that can be easily accomplished by hand. But if you are not into modifying theme files or like to switch themes often – these plugins will make sure that you blog will be tracked no matter what you do!

In my testing this plugin added to the page load speed and I eventually disabled it but if you want to know EXACTLY who is visiting your blog, what OS, Browser they are using, where they are coming from and what is it they are reading – this plugin will be a God sent!

I promise you that you can get more information than you ever bargained for by using this one but do pay attention if it impacts you blog loading speed, as implementation of this one might actually cause people to click away instead of waiting for your content to load and all you will see is How Many People Left Your Blog without reading it!

This plugin allows you to integrate your WordPress blog with free Lijit account. Great option to enhance your blog search as well as to get a LOT of information about your blog. It does help you get more traffic as your blog becomes part of their searched network and presented on other blogs 🙂

Anytime I can get free traffic – I’m game, especially when it is integrated with my favorite time wasting exercise – Traffic Stats Checking!

Couple of the most important statistics I look for from this one is LastSearches Performed on My Blog and Last Searches That Returned No Results!

It opens up an opportunity for me to create content my readers and visitors are looking for and one that doesn’t exist yet. Obviously that the younger your blog – more opportunities you will have as with age it seems sometimes that we cover pretty much most of the important ideas 🙂

Yeah, when we are talking about stats – your RSS readers information is VERY important. Number of RSS readers on the blog is in fact one of the aspects many bloggers, including myself always put forth as it shows Stable Readership Base that can be used when selling advertisement space on your blog among the few other things 🙂

This plugin give you easy access to see:

Subscribers

Hits

Reach (see the FAQ section for more information about this)

Item click-through

Item Views

Pretty nice but it does require that you burn your feed through FeedBurner as it uses its data to provide you with stats.

Conclusion

5 plugins I have just shared with you can make you a lot more informed blogger and help you determine what works and what doesn’t in your promotional efforts but I recommend you use these plugins in moderation!

Just because something is available to you – doesn’t mean all of it have to be used. If you attempt to utilize all plugins at same time – more than likely your blog load speed will be impacted!

Choose what stats are important to you – use appropriate plugin to get it! Enjoy and as always – comment on this post and share it using options provided!

Great List.. I use google analytics, but love another plugin called : count-per-day that shows you what articles are visited each day , how many reads you have had from the same visitor, statistics graphics, month comparatives, and you can configure it to avoid bots counts and many more.. Keeping track of your blog visitors is sure addictive. Thanks for sharing .-= Jadah´s last blog ..Turning yourself into a Remote Control =-.

Stats don’t mean a hill of beans to me. I could care less cuz I just blog to have fun and that’s it. No money or anything else involved. LOL. Thanks for stopping by my site 🙂 Much appreciated .-= Thom´s last blog ..An TP4WW Update =-.

Addictive? You bet! I use sitemeter and I have to admit that checking it is the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing at night – and who knows how many times in between. Love the sounds of these though if I start paying attention to more of these I’ll never get any work done! .-= Liz Bolton´s last blog ..Medford Mass Real Estate Activity – February 2010 =-.

awstats is a great package but doesn’t really provide the details many time you need to have good understanding of how your readers interact with your blog and as such – provide more of what people want.

Thanks for including Lijit on your list of 5 stats tracking plugins for WordPress!

This is a great list you have compiled and I completely agree with you that our: Last Searches Performed on My Blog and Last Searches That Returned No Results really highlight reader intent and help you come up with new blogging content.

Personally, I love to compare Google Analytics to Lijit stats because they both offer something different. We continually hear from users that their Lijit stats offer more of a visual aid (graphs, pictures, etc.) with a simplistic view of focusing statistics on search.

I use WordPress stats and also Google Analytics. I know that WP Stats is pretty lame, but the only reason why I use it is because I can quickly have a look at current numbers every time I login into WordPress. Not great, but satisfied.

Hey Alex, Thanks for the post. You are so right about being careful with wasting too much time analyzing stats though – lol. I’ve been using StatPress on a couple of my blogs as well as kStats. StatPress is more detailed with its reporting and kstats is more brief. I like them both. I also run Google’s analytics on the blogs as well – you can never have enough stats! 😉 Cheers, Mark .-= Mark Krsuch´s last blog ..The Freshwater Killer Whale Catfish Is Finally Seen =-.

I currently use Google Analytics which is fairly comprehensive but you just convinced me to take Lijit for a test drive. Why do I have the feeling I’ll be spending a lot more time analyzing than being productive? 😉

Recent Posts

Affiliate Disclosure

You should assume that the owner of this website is an affiliate for providers of goods and services mentioned on this website and may be compensated when you purchase from a provider. To learn more, click here | Legal